An Intraorganizational Ecological Perspective on Managerial Risk Behavior, Performance, and Survival: Individual, Organizational, and Environmental Effects

Abstract During the last fifteen years, organization ecology has become a major paradigm in the study of organizations (e.g., Carroll, 1988; Hannan and Freeman, 1989). To date studies in organization ecology have been conducted primarily at the organization, population, and community levels of analysis, while phenomena within organizations have largely been ignored. This results, in part, from the fact that organizational ecology is premised on relative inertia of organizations, implying that change processes within organizations are largely irrelevant. A few studies have used the logic of organizational ecology to examine phenomena within organizations. For instance, Langton (l 984) has elucidated the evolution of the Wedgwood pottery firm in the United Kingdom; Miner (1990, 1991) has studied the role of idiosyncratic job development within organizations as a means of adaptation; and Burgelman (1991) has suggested an intraorganizational ecological perspective to explain the transformation of Intel Corporation from a memory company to a microcomputer company. These studies suggest that organizational ecology provides a powerful intellectual perspective which need not exclude the study of intraorganizational phenomena.